Lean Thinking

In previous posts (here, here and here) I have called out the need for really solid agile leadership to enable change. Without great leadership, change falters. We know what bad leadership looks like - directive, dis-empowering, disconnect between what they say and what they do. We all know the symptoms of bad management. But what does good management look like?

We can do the obvious and just say that good leadership looks like the reverse of bad leadership - non directive, empowering, behaves in accordance with what they are saying and so on. All that is true, but I have seen really empowering, non directive leaders who were still bad leaders at driving change. I think there is something fundamental that all leaders need to make them effective at delivering lasting change. That thing is the ability (and desire) to change themselves.

Leadership is crucial to a large scale agile transformation. You can go so far bottom up but to achieve any sort of real scale you need to get some leaders involved. A lot of what I do day to day is get leaders involved and engaged in the transformation process. When talking to leaders, this question inevitably comes up - "What is the single most important thing I can do as a leader to make this work?" For quite some time, my standard answer has been "Set a good example."

Have we ever seen this situation - the boss has just announced a fantastic new agile change program and that he or she is right behind it. "Agile is the most important thing the organisation can be doing" they say. But over the next few weeks it becomes clear that they aren't turning up to the business scrum, are too busy to make the sprint review, can't afford the time to attend backlog refinement. Then other people's attendance starts to drift off. "Too busy" becomes the standard excuse for missing something. The agile transformation falters, struggles on for a while, then vanishes without a trace.